THE Deno team is joining Cloudflare, with a plan to merge workerd and celld and enable the Deno runtime to be self-hosted at scale. The goal is to simplify running Cloudflare’s Workers and Durable Objects on users’ own infrastructure, by providing a distributed, self-hosted foundation that can manage placement, routing and durable storage across many locations.
The article frames this as a continuation of Cloudflare’s open source approach to its runtime, while leveraging Deno’s experience building a developer-friendly, self-hosted runtime. Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node[.]js, along with Kenton Varda of Cloudflare, present the move as a step toward making the Workers programming model more accessible beyond Cloudflare’s network.
Key details from the piece explain that celld provides a distributed, multi-machine embodiment of Durable Objects, queues and other primitives, while workerd is the runtime used to run them. By merging celld’s distributed capabilities with workerd, and integrating Deno’s tooling, Cloudflare aims to make it straightforward for developers to deploy and operate distributed applications on their own infrastructure.
The post also addresses a common critique about vendor lock-in, arguing that Workers was designed to be better and more portable, and that open sourcing the runtime and collaborating with Deno creates an real escape hatch rather than a trap. The plan foresees Ryan Dahl and Bert Belder taking a lead on self-hosted deployment, with further announcements expected in the coming months.